Kyle Becker at The Independent Review Journal recently posted an article claiming to list the 16 things we learned from the government shutdown (see Becker article here). The list includes only a few items that are accurate, such as “The American people deserve better than what they are getting from this government.” For the most part, they are either stupidly picky complaints about some effect of the shutdown or they show an ignorance of how the government, legislation, and the economy work.
Mr. Becker whines about the national monuments being shut down and about money being spent on signs that say “Closed due to government shutdown” rather than just “Closed.” He does not have the wisdom or judgment to admit that such things are trivial compared to other programs that were cut and that the real issue here is the Republicans willingness to hurt American people for no good reason.
Several items that show the writer’s ignorance about the government’s role in the economy and about how government debt is different than a regular person’s debt are shown in the following items from his list:
“The way that Washington politicians solve a debt ceiling crisis is to always vote for more debt.”
Reality: Politicians did not vote for more debt. They voted to pay debts already incurred. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole debt crisis and debt ceiling issues. Congress had already voted to fund federal programs. Raising the debt ceiling is just saying that they are willing to in fact pay for these obligations. It is just as if you leased a car and agreed to pay $300 per month for the next few years. If you don’t want the obligation to make your lease payments, you should have avoided making a lease beforehand, but you don’t get to skip out on paying what you contracted to pay. The government shutdown cost us about $2 billion. That’s $2 billion of our money wasted for nothing. The real cause of the high national debt is not raising the debt ceiling. It comes from Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, his getting us involved in two mismanaged (and, in the case of Iraq, unnecessary) wars, and the corrupt financial sector that both Democrats and Republicans have enabled. If you want to reduce the debt, elect a Congress that raises taxes on the people who have an increasing share of this country’s wealth (the rich), cuts the bloated budgets for defense and “homeland” security, and passes measures that actually help regular people get good paying jobs that not only help them individually but also lead to increased tax revenues.
“Obama basically argued that if we don’t borrow more money it’s like a ‘deadbeat’ choosing not to pay his mortgage. Wouldn’t putting bills on a credit card be the sort of thing a ‘deadbeat’ would do?”
Reality: This is a poor analogy. If you put bills on a credit card, you still presumably plan or promise to pay the credit card debt. Republicans want to just walk away from obligations. If we allowed this kind of behavior to become the norm, the U. S. government’s budget process would become unpredictable, and the economy would react negatively. The country’s credit rating would surely go down, thus causing more expense to service the debt.
“400,000 non-essential “public servants” being laid off for a few weeks is more important than the fate of 310 million citizens and their per person debt of around $54,000 each”
Reality: While it is true that you can divide the total debt by the number of people to get an amount that each supposedly owes, it doesn’t really work this way. What should happen if the government, especially Congress, did its job correctly with regards to influencing the economy is that it would enact policies that would improve the economy, thus raising more revenue to reduce debt. That is, everyone throughout the economy would be earning more, and keeping more, even though they would be paying a higher tax amount (because of their larger income). If the Republicans keep hurting the economy, this future can never come about. And, yes, we do need to raise taxes on the rich. Bush cut them irresponsibly at the same time he was running up huge amounts of debt by getting into two wars.
“Compromise” for the Democrats always means meeting 100% of its demands.
Reality: This one shows how ignorant Becker is of how legislation comes about. For one thing, the ACA was itself a compromise. That’s the way legislation works when there are two parties. Whatever law gets passed inevitably has compromises. For the Republicans to threaten a government shutdown in order to get further compromises is ludicrous. Second, during Obama’s entire administration, Obama and the Democrats have been willing to compromise but the Republicans haven’t. In fact, progressives continually criticize Obama for being far too willing to compromise with the rightwing.
If you take Kyle Becker’s article seriously, you become more ignorant than you were beforehand. It serves only to confirm the biases many people unfortunately have based on the vastAmountof garbage the right wing sends to them.
